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also stuff like: • what are you going to work on • why is it important to the company

• why is it important to the company

uh, what a great point that is missing from all the JDs!!

Hey Neil, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you feel is missing from most job specs as I would certainly like to advise my clients if they need to rethink what they are writing. I think culture is a hard one to define on paper and everyone will say they have an "open, transparent culture" but what you need to see is hard evidence. For example, would it help if a job spec had testimonials from staff already working there? I'm surprised that companies don't list their benefits. I think companies often forget that in a tough candidate market, they need to be selling to potential candidates for sure!

I think testimonials in the job posting would be forced. If I want sentiment, I rely on things like blind or glassdoor.

Thanks Justin. I understand why Glassdoor would be one of the first places to look. I had a client who sadly had to make a few layoffs as a project closed and there were some pretty damning comments. Once they are there, you can't remove them and it wasn't a true reflection of the company overall. However, I think it can give a good insight in general over a longer period of time

of course if you are talking about job spec, that's what you got, but I know we engineers to buy into working for a company based on the job spec. We want to know, what is the project delivering, what difference will it make to the word. Why the company exists. Of course you might be giving too much away, we know sometimes you want to leave a reason to call the recruiter, but then if the company sounds nice to work for and you can make a difference, why wouldn't we call?

Thank you Neil, I really appreciate you taking the time to write down your thoughts. When we act on behalf of a company we are of course always wanting to do our best to attract candidates so any feedback from the other side of the fence always helps! Louise

Omg @Neil Millard I feel you! As a recruiter, 90% of job ads I read are absolute pants! And just have a stupid amount of tools/techs on that aren't actually relevant/must haves lol! Find it really important to focus the majority of the qualification call focusing on what's in it for the engineer. Cool technical challenges, growth plans, the personalities of the colleagues you will be working with, how the specific projects fit in with company goals. On top of this, if I can't speak to the technical hiring manager, I am 90% unlikely to engage in the search because you just don't get the sexy exciting info! No recruitment team, working with AWS, Kubernetes and Terraform alone is not exciting 🤣 Says a lot about how the company views hiring if they don't allow this too 👀O

Find it really important to focus the majority of the qualification call focusing on what’s in it for the engineer. Cool technical challenges, growth plans, the personalities of the colleagues you will be working with, how the specific projects fit in with company goals.

I totally agree! I add some feedback too 1. I appreciate if the company links to glassdoor 2. If they don’t do that (like for @Louise Ogilvy’s example) link it anyway! And explain why there are negative reviews there! Transparency IMO is way better compared to pretend that glassdoor does not exist 3. If glassdoor contains negative feedback about the interview process… mention at least that you are trying to improve it! Or that you are aware of the things you need to improve but you have other priorities right now 🙂 4. I do not need testimonials (I agree they could be forced), I only need a “long” chapter about the internal culture (or a link to the culture page since a lot of companies have one) 5. I totally agree with what @Randy Clinton said 6. I’d like to find info about the current runway of the startup of if it’s profitable or not 7. I’d like to know precisely about the remote culture (a lot of companies do not mention the remote option even if they work remotely and/or they report “Remote in US” then you find out in the first interview that everyone is truly distributed) and overlap requirements 8. I prefer to read a lot about the technical choices and frameworks and even links to the engineering blog. For example, I saved this JD because it’s one of the best I have ever found https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UvimvW86-v6ogH-M6icGmC1Uhq4fgD2K/view?usp=sharing